Windows MSI Installers for release 2015.07

2015-07-27

A useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to announce the July 2015 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the July 2015 release is available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

This Rakudo Star release comes with support for the MoarVM backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms).

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language ("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as "Rakudo Perl". This Star release includes release 2015.07.2 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 2015.07 of MoarVM, plus various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

Some of the new compiler features added to this release include:

Cool.substr(-rw) and &substr(-rw) now also accept a Range

Added trait "is required" on class attributes

&?ROUTINE and &?BLOCK

&words implemented (to completement .words)

Numeric comparison ops (== > etc) for DateTimes

samewith() now also works in subs

Calling the .clone method with alternate values no longer changes original

.grep and &grep now consume multiple elements for many-param blocks

ENTER phaser now can be used as an r-value

Notable changes in modules shipped with Rakudo Star:

Bailador: Add links to documentation

DBIish: Use Postgres environment variables for test configuration

doc: More documentation, mostly for IO-related classes and methods

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases. Some of the not-quite-there features include:

advanced macros

non-blocking I/O (in progress)

much of Synopsis 9 and 11

There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo's backends and other Perl 6 implementations.

In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in the release tarball.